China Mieville - The Scar

She was awed by that prodigious effort. The city easily dwarfed the proliferation of ships that were pulling at it. It was hard to estimate Armada’s motion, but looking at the water coursing between ships, and the slap of breakers against the edges of the city, Bellis suspected that their passage was cripplingly slow.

Where are we going? she wondered, helplessly.

Bellis felt curiously shamed. It was weeks since she had arrived on Armada, and she realized that she had not wondered about the city’s motion, about its passage across the sea or its itinerary, or how its fleet, out engaged in their piracy, found their way back to a home that moved. She remembered with a sudden shudder Johannes’ attack on her the previous night.

Some of what he had said was true.

So was much of what she herself had said, of course, and she was still angry with him. She did not want to live on Armada, and the thought of seeing out her days on this mesh of moldering tubs made her mouth curl with anger so strong it was like panic. But still.

But still, it was true that she had locked herself off in her unhappiness. She was ignorant of her situation, ignorant of Armada’s history and politics, and she realized that this was dangerous. She did not understand the city’s economies; she did not know where the ships came from that sailed into the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. She did not know where the city had been or where it was going.

She began to open her mind as she stood in her nightgown, watching the sun pour across the bows of the slowly moving city. She felt her curiosity unfurl.

The Lovers , she thought with distaste. Let’s start there. Godspit, the Lovers. What in the name of Jabber are they?

Shekel took coffee with her on an upper deck of the library.

He was an excited boy. He told her that he was doing something with one person, and something else with another, and that he had had a fight with a third, and that a fourth lived in Dry Fall riding, and she withered beside his casual knowledge of the city. She felt disgraced again, for her ignorance, and she listened carefully to his ramblings.

Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactacae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate-merchant for Dreer Samher, and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous island south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men.

In turn, Bellis asked him about the ridings, the haunted quarter, the city’s route, the Sorghum rig, Tintinnabulum. She turned up her questions like cards.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I know Tinnabol. Him and his mates. Strange coves. Makler, Metzger, Promus, Tinnabol. There’s one called Argentarius, who’s mad, who no one ever sees. I can’t remember the others. Inside the Castor ’s all over trophies. Gruesome. Sea trophies. Every wall. Stuffed hammerheads and orca, things with claws and tentacles. Skulls. And harpoons. And helios of the crew standing on the corpses of things I hope I never see.

“They’re hunters. They ain’t been in the city so long. They’re not press-ganged, exactly. There’s loads of stories, rumors about what they’re doing, why they’re here. It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

Bellis could not understand how Shekel knew so much about Tintinnabulum until he grinned and continued.

“Tintinnabulum’s got a… an assistant,” he said. “Her name’s Angevine. She’s an interesting lady.” He grinned again, and Bellis turned away, embarrassed by his fumbling enthusiasm.

There were printing presses in Armada, and authors and editors and translators, and new books and Salt translations of classic texts were brought out. But paper was scarce: print runs were minuscule, and the books were expensive. The ridings of the city relied on Booktown’s Grand Gears Library, and paid premiums to ensure their borrowing rights.

The books came mostly from Garwater riding’s piracies. For an unknown number of centuries this most powerful riding in Armada had donated all the books it commandeered to The Clockhouse Spur. No matter who ran Booktown, these donations had ensured its loyalty. Other ridings copied the practice, though perhaps without such stern supervision. They might let their press-ganged keep this or that volume, or would trade some of the rarest volumes they snatched. Not Garwater, which treated book hoarding as a serious crime.

Sometimes Garwater ships would prowl the coastal settlements of Bas-Lag committing wordstorms, and the pirates would rampage from house to house, seizing every book and manuscript they found. All for Booktown, the Clockhouse Spur.

The delivery of all this plunder was ongoing, so Bellis and her colleagues kept busy.

The khepri newcomers in their Mercy Ships, randomly intercepted by Armada, had taken over the Booktown riding in a gentle coup more than a century before. They had been wise enough to realize that despite traditional khepri lack of interest in written texts-their compound eyes made reading somewhat difficult-the riding relied on its library. They had continued its stewardship.

Bellis could not estimate the number of books: there were so many tiny old holds in the ships of the library, so many converted chimneys and bulkheads, stripped cabins, annexes, all stuffed with texts. Many were ancient, countless thousands of them long undisturbed. Armada had been stealing books for many centuries.

The catalogs were only partial. In recent centuries a bureaucracy had arisen whose function was to list the library’s contents, but during some reigns they were more careful than others. Mistakes were always made. A few acquisitions were shelved almost randomly, insufficiently checked. Errors slipped into systems and begot other errors. There were decades’ worth of volumes hidden in the library, in plain view yet invisible. Rumors and legends were rife about their powerful, lost, hidden, or forbidden contents.

When she had first gone into the dark corridors, Bellis had run her fingers along the miles of shelves as she walked. She had pulled a book out at random and, opening it, had stopped short to see the handwritten name in fading ink on the top of the first page. She had tugged out another volume and there was another name, written in calligraphy and ink only a little more recent. The third book was unadorned, but the fourth, again, was marked as the property of another long-dead owner.

Bellis had stood still and read the names again and again, and felt suddenly claustrophobic. She was encased in stolen books, buried in them as if in dirt. The thought of the countless hundreds of thousands of names that surrounded her, vainly scrawled in top right-hand corners-the weight of all that ignored ink, the endless proclamations that this is mine this is mine , every one of them snubbed simply and imperiously-took Bellis’ breath from her chest. The ease with which those little commands were broken.

She felt as if all around her, morose ghosts were milling, unable to accept that the volumes were no longer theirs.

That day, as she sorted through new arrivals, Bellis found one of her own books.

She sat for a long time on the floor with her legs splayed, propped up against the shelves, staring at the copy of Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub . She felt the familiar fraying spine and the slightly embossed “B. Coldwine.” It was her own copy: she recognized its wear. She gazed at it guardedly, as if it were a test she might fail.

The cart did not contain her other work, High Kettai Grammatology , but she did find the Salkrikaltor Cray textbook she had brought to the Terpsichoria .

Our stuff’s finally coming through , she thought.

It affected her like a blow.